So, hopefully, this is permissible. This is a C&P of part of a post from our friend J.C. Shurburtt. I’m posting from my phone, so I apologize if formatting is bad. I’m sure it is TL;DR, but do yourself a favor. You’re not going to believe this shit.
Getting Beamer Ball 2.0 on track to ascend
J.C. Shurburtt
Carolina is now 23 games in to Beamer Ball 2.0 under head coach Shane Beamer. There are a lot of good things that have happened during his short tenure so far.
-The Culture that Beamer wants to build is in place in spite ofsome ugly losses. It's helped this team win games this year.
-Carolina signed a top 25 class for 2022 (including a top 10 class from the portal) and has a top 15 class for 2023. In-state recruiting is starting to become more favorable and the staff has made in-roads in areas this program has not always recruited well before like the Washington, D.C., area. The assistant coaches and off-field personnel like Taylor Edwards have all done an excellent job on the trail and it is only going to get better.
-There's an elite support staff with people like Derrick Moore, who is the best in the country at what he does. In today's challenging world for young people and in particular student athletes, there's no more valuable resource.
-Fan support is at an all-time high since Spurrier.
-Williams-Brice Stadium now more closely resembles a rock concert than a college football game at night. It's gone from a tough place to play to an absolutely bonkers atmosphere for night games.
-There is still a state of the art, $50 million ops building and one of the top indoor and outdoor practice facilities in the country in place. That goes along with elite level housing (650 Lincoln) and academic support (The Dodie) for student athletes.
The team is 6-4 and it's been somewhat of a disappointing season to date. Carolina is still going bowling, but this is where you have to dig in and where the past is relevant to the future.
Let’s take stock of all three phases and since it is indeed Beamer Ball, we will start with special teams. The Gamecocks have the best special teams in the country, both in terms of eyeball test and metrics. The kicking game is elite, the return game is dangerous, the coverage and block units are excellent and coordinator Pete Lembo, who in many ways is the “Spurrier of special teams” is elite when it comes to scouting the opposing team for opportunities to run fakes that his players execute flawlessly and with confidence. This phase of the game gives Carolina hope and particularly in 2022 has shined. If this continues (and there is no reason why it should not), it is going to make a huge difference now and in the future for this program. Right now, it’s the one spot Carolina has an advantage game to game. This box is checked. Defensively, the name of the game so far has been turnovers. The Gamecocks are relatively consistent forcing them, though the nature of the game is that you don’t always get them. Even in Saturday’s 38-6 drubbing at the hands of Florida in The Swamp, cornerback Darius Rush had his hands on an interception early. Beyond that, though, we’ve seen Clayton White, USC’s defensive coordinator, dial up plenty of exotic pressures from time to time and a Carolina secondary that seems to disguise its coverages well, leading to interceptions. We have seen White’s units both here and at Western Kentucky get into attack mode and cause a lot of havoc and chaos, which is exactly what you want a defense to do. Yes, this side of the ball needs to get better at stopping the run like yesterday, but the players have all commented on how fun it is to play in the scheme and when it is clicking, it’s quite good. That brings us to the offense. Despite an influx of talent this year and multiple returning players developing and getting better, it’s a mess. It moves at a glacial pace. Everyone from time to time is completely confused. On Saturday, this unit had three turnovers in four plays. Although that sounds crazy, nobody was really shocked by it. Playmakers will have a big game then all of a sudden disappear from the game plan week-to-week. The playbook is way too big. They seem to want to reinvent the wheel every week with no rhyme or reason to do so. The personnel usage is abysmal. There’s no diagnosis of the other team’s weakness at at times the play calls make no sense. Case in point, how many times did the Gamecocks try to run it against Florida with eight in the box? How many times did the Gamecocks try to run it during a 44-30 loss at Arkansas when the Hogs had two or three in the box? This offense has never even had a decent game when it could not line up and run the ball at will against an opponent and it’s unrealistic for that to happen in even most games against a decent team. Don’t get me wrong, you have to find a way to scratch out some rushing yards to have a shot at winning, but sometimes you have to pass to set it up to loosen up a defense. This offense also operates between the hash marks, which makes it simple to defend (no matter how complex the ideas are) and tries to force the issue by running its backs into a brick wall over and over metaphorically. There’s nothing about this offense that is even close to good and the personnel usage alone should be a reason to completely scrap it.
Join Carolina Rise to help the Gamecocks! | Lembo up for the Broyles Award | Here’s the good news. While this particular offense is a heavy enough anchor to sink the S.S. South Carolina, it can also be cut loose and sent to the ocean floor. Beamer Ball 2.0 can continue with a fresh plan that makes sense for South Carolina. The head coach does want to run the football and he’s spot on. You have to. But there are plenty of systems out there that are college systems that make defenses defend the entire field that are easy to implement and that put a major emphasis on getting the ball to their best playmakers every single game.
Case in point. The Gamecocks are blessed with versatile players. In reality, Carolina could line up Jaheim Bell, Marshawn Lloyd, Austin Stogner, Antwane Wells and Xavier Legette or JuJuMcDowell (this is hypothetical) along with Spencer Rattler and five offensive linemen and run how many different personnel packages? If you do it fast, the defense can’t substitute. Instead, it’s somewhere between Flash the Sloth from the Disney movie Zootopia and the Bataan Death March depending on your taste in analogies. Not exactly what most college offenses are doing these days. And don’t get me wrong, there’s a time to slow it down for sure. Because the offense is what it is, can White and his defense afford to come into a game and gamble with pressures and the like? This Saturday’s opponent Tennessee has been statistically impressive on defense. The Vols have a bunch of guys who fly around, sell out to stop the run and play like their hair is on fire and if they give up a big play, who cares? Their offense is going to go score most of the time and they know it. They are able to play completely free and it has paid off on that side of the ball. That’s not to say that Carolina needs to go sell out the next two games. It can’t. But as a defensive coordinator you can be a whole lot more aggressive when you know your offense can go score. It’s even better when your offense can stay on the field and even better when your offense doesn’t put you in Mission Impossible types of situations like last Saturday. So this has to be fixed and there will be plenty of options from the college level to get the job done. The reality is that of the programs in the SEC that have ascended with new hires (Beamer has raised the win total and has ascended, but others have been ranked in the top 10, have multiple signature wins, etc.) have done so with offense. Look at Tennessee, Ole Miss, Arkansas when it isn’t injured at quarterback, even Mississippi State which has how many top 25 wins under Mike Leach. All have elevated with offense. Look who is struggling. Texas A&M, which has issues but the main complaint is a JimboFisher system in a state that primarily plays spread/Air Raid at the high school level. Kentucky is not having the season it would like and Mark Stoops publicly said the other day that the pro-style offense he is running is perhaps too complicated. Auburn’s system, which came from Boise State, was like watching paint dry until it started playing a dual-threat quarterback. There was a coaching change there. The teams that are successful running pro-style type systems these days are at places like Alabama and Georgia where they scale it back, take the best and most creative stuff from the pro level, teach it like a college offense, have good play calls on from experienced coaches and oh, those teams also have a lot of talent on an annual basis.
Everyone else has to be unique and modern and have a style that just lets their players go play. The current offensive coordinator actually said in a press conference recently that they are “still figuring out what they want to be and are young in the system”… That was an amazingly hard quote for anyone to swallow. There’s no planet where in college football you can afford almost two seasons to “learn the system”, particularly when there really is no proven system at all. So back to the good news. Beamer has the best special teams in the country and a defensive coordinator that has proven to be creative, whose players have fun playing in the scheme and that forces turnovers. There’s been good player development in the secondary as well. It’s not Bud Foster at Virginia Tech (that’s a different scheme) but it sort of is the same type of philosophy when it can be. Again, they must get better against the run without question, but you can see how things can come together and work. Getting a new plan on offense that more closely aligns with Beamer’s vision (remember when he was hired the talk was Joe Brady meets Lincoln Riley on offense and that has quickly devolved into something like the Los Angeles Rams?) Is the key to getting Beamer Ball 2.0 not only back on track but to elevating the Gamecocks. South Carolina athletics director Ray Tanner even uttered the phrase “the name of the game these days is offense” the day Beamer was hired. It’s unfair to expect perfection when even the most veteran of head coaches is putting together a coaching staff. Spurrier had three defensive coordinators from 2005-07 until he landed on Johnson. Also, Georgia coach Kirby Smart on the other end of the spectrum as a first-time head coach is on offensive coordinator No. 3 (and he has an elite one) since 2016. This is not an indictment of Beamer and the job he has done. It’s simply a necessary course correction at the end of the regular season. Most head coaches have to make changes. The ones that are great make the right ones. The ones that fail make the wrong ones. At South Carolina, more than a lot of places, it’s imperative that the head coach makes the right one when things like this are evident. Beamer is a high-energy coach with a low-energy offense. It does not make sense considering what the other aspects of this program are all about. A fix is the first thing that needs to happen in order for this program to move forward like it can and like it is positioned to do… and that’s even if Carolina somehow shocks the world against the Vols and Clemson the last two games. It can get right quickly if the right call is made.
Getting Beamer Ball 2.0 on track to ascend
J.C. Shurburtt
Carolina is now 23 games in to Beamer Ball 2.0 under head coach Shane Beamer. There are a lot of good things that have happened during his short tenure so far.
-The Culture that Beamer wants to build is in place in spite ofsome ugly losses. It's helped this team win games this year.
-Carolina signed a top 25 class for 2022 (including a top 10 class from the portal) and has a top 15 class for 2023. In-state recruiting is starting to become more favorable and the staff has made in-roads in areas this program has not always recruited well before like the Washington, D.C., area. The assistant coaches and off-field personnel like Taylor Edwards have all done an excellent job on the trail and it is only going to get better.
-There's an elite support staff with people like Derrick Moore, who is the best in the country at what he does. In today's challenging world for young people and in particular student athletes, there's no more valuable resource.
-Fan support is at an all-time high since Spurrier.
-Williams-Brice Stadium now more closely resembles a rock concert than a college football game at night. It's gone from a tough place to play to an absolutely bonkers atmosphere for night games.
-There is still a state of the art, $50 million ops building and one of the top indoor and outdoor practice facilities in the country in place. That goes along with elite level housing (650 Lincoln) and academic support (The Dodie) for student athletes.
The team is 6-4 and it's been somewhat of a disappointing season to date. Carolina is still going bowling, but this is where you have to dig in and where the past is relevant to the future.
Let’s take stock of all three phases and since it is indeed Beamer Ball, we will start with special teams. The Gamecocks have the best special teams in the country, both in terms of eyeball test and metrics. The kicking game is elite, the return game is dangerous, the coverage and block units are excellent and coordinator Pete Lembo, who in many ways is the “Spurrier of special teams” is elite when it comes to scouting the opposing team for opportunities to run fakes that his players execute flawlessly and with confidence. This phase of the game gives Carolina hope and particularly in 2022 has shined. If this continues (and there is no reason why it should not), it is going to make a huge difference now and in the future for this program. Right now, it’s the one spot Carolina has an advantage game to game. This box is checked. Defensively, the name of the game so far has been turnovers. The Gamecocks are relatively consistent forcing them, though the nature of the game is that you don’t always get them. Even in Saturday’s 38-6 drubbing at the hands of Florida in The Swamp, cornerback Darius Rush had his hands on an interception early. Beyond that, though, we’ve seen Clayton White, USC’s defensive coordinator, dial up plenty of exotic pressures from time to time and a Carolina secondary that seems to disguise its coverages well, leading to interceptions. We have seen White’s units both here and at Western Kentucky get into attack mode and cause a lot of havoc and chaos, which is exactly what you want a defense to do. Yes, this side of the ball needs to get better at stopping the run like yesterday, but the players have all commented on how fun it is to play in the scheme and when it is clicking, it’s quite good. That brings us to the offense. Despite an influx of talent this year and multiple returning players developing and getting better, it’s a mess. It moves at a glacial pace. Everyone from time to time is completely confused. On Saturday, this unit had three turnovers in four plays. Although that sounds crazy, nobody was really shocked by it. Playmakers will have a big game then all of a sudden disappear from the game plan week-to-week. The playbook is way too big. They seem to want to reinvent the wheel every week with no rhyme or reason to do so. The personnel usage is abysmal. There’s no diagnosis of the other team’s weakness at at times the play calls make no sense. Case in point, how many times did the Gamecocks try to run it against Florida with eight in the box? How many times did the Gamecocks try to run it during a 44-30 loss at Arkansas when the Hogs had two or three in the box? This offense has never even had a decent game when it could not line up and run the ball at will against an opponent and it’s unrealistic for that to happen in even most games against a decent team. Don’t get me wrong, you have to find a way to scratch out some rushing yards to have a shot at winning, but sometimes you have to pass to set it up to loosen up a defense. This offense also operates between the hash marks, which makes it simple to defend (no matter how complex the ideas are) and tries to force the issue by running its backs into a brick wall over and over metaphorically. There’s nothing about this offense that is even close to good and the personnel usage alone should be a reason to completely scrap it.
Join Carolina Rise to help the Gamecocks! | Lembo up for the Broyles Award | Here’s the good news. While this particular offense is a heavy enough anchor to sink the S.S. South Carolina, it can also be cut loose and sent to the ocean floor. Beamer Ball 2.0 can continue with a fresh plan that makes sense for South Carolina. The head coach does want to run the football and he’s spot on. You have to. But there are plenty of systems out there that are college systems that make defenses defend the entire field that are easy to implement and that put a major emphasis on getting the ball to their best playmakers every single game.
Case in point. The Gamecocks are blessed with versatile players. In reality, Carolina could line up Jaheim Bell, Marshawn Lloyd, Austin Stogner, Antwane Wells and Xavier Legette or JuJuMcDowell (this is hypothetical) along with Spencer Rattler and five offensive linemen and run how many different personnel packages? If you do it fast, the defense can’t substitute. Instead, it’s somewhere between Flash the Sloth from the Disney movie Zootopia and the Bataan Death March depending on your taste in analogies. Not exactly what most college offenses are doing these days. And don’t get me wrong, there’s a time to slow it down for sure. Because the offense is what it is, can White and his defense afford to come into a game and gamble with pressures and the like? This Saturday’s opponent Tennessee has been statistically impressive on defense. The Vols have a bunch of guys who fly around, sell out to stop the run and play like their hair is on fire and if they give up a big play, who cares? Their offense is going to go score most of the time and they know it. They are able to play completely free and it has paid off on that side of the ball. That’s not to say that Carolina needs to go sell out the next two games. It can’t. But as a defensive coordinator you can be a whole lot more aggressive when you know your offense can go score. It’s even better when your offense can stay on the field and even better when your offense doesn’t put you in Mission Impossible types of situations like last Saturday. So this has to be fixed and there will be plenty of options from the college level to get the job done. The reality is that of the programs in the SEC that have ascended with new hires (Beamer has raised the win total and has ascended, but others have been ranked in the top 10, have multiple signature wins, etc.) have done so with offense. Look at Tennessee, Ole Miss, Arkansas when it isn’t injured at quarterback, even Mississippi State which has how many top 25 wins under Mike Leach. All have elevated with offense. Look who is struggling. Texas A&M, which has issues but the main complaint is a JimboFisher system in a state that primarily plays spread/Air Raid at the high school level. Kentucky is not having the season it would like and Mark Stoops publicly said the other day that the pro-style offense he is running is perhaps too complicated. Auburn’s system, which came from Boise State, was like watching paint dry until it started playing a dual-threat quarterback. There was a coaching change there. The teams that are successful running pro-style type systems these days are at places like Alabama and Georgia where they scale it back, take the best and most creative stuff from the pro level, teach it like a college offense, have good play calls on from experienced coaches and oh, those teams also have a lot of talent on an annual basis.
Everyone else has to be unique and modern and have a style that just lets their players go play. The current offensive coordinator actually said in a press conference recently that they are “still figuring out what they want to be and are young in the system”… That was an amazingly hard quote for anyone to swallow. There’s no planet where in college football you can afford almost two seasons to “learn the system”, particularly when there really is no proven system at all. So back to the good news. Beamer has the best special teams in the country and a defensive coordinator that has proven to be creative, whose players have fun playing in the scheme and that forces turnovers. There’s been good player development in the secondary as well. It’s not Bud Foster at Virginia Tech (that’s a different scheme) but it sort of is the same type of philosophy when it can be. Again, they must get better against the run without question, but you can see how things can come together and work. Getting a new plan on offense that more closely aligns with Beamer’s vision (remember when he was hired the talk was Joe Brady meets Lincoln Riley on offense and that has quickly devolved into something like the Los Angeles Rams?) Is the key to getting Beamer Ball 2.0 not only back on track but to elevating the Gamecocks. South Carolina athletics director Ray Tanner even uttered the phrase “the name of the game these days is offense” the day Beamer was hired. It’s unfair to expect perfection when even the most veteran of head coaches is putting together a coaching staff. Spurrier had three defensive coordinators from 2005-07 until he landed on Johnson. Also, Georgia coach Kirby Smart on the other end of the spectrum as a first-time head coach is on offensive coordinator No. 3 (and he has an elite one) since 2016. This is not an indictment of Beamer and the job he has done. It’s simply a necessary course correction at the end of the regular season. Most head coaches have to make changes. The ones that are great make the right ones. The ones that fail make the wrong ones. At South Carolina, more than a lot of places, it’s imperative that the head coach makes the right one when things like this are evident. Beamer is a high-energy coach with a low-energy offense. It does not make sense considering what the other aspects of this program are all about. A fix is the first thing that needs to happen in order for this program to move forward like it can and like it is positioned to do… and that’s even if Carolina somehow shocks the world against the Vols and Clemson the last two games. It can get right quickly if the right call is made.
